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Let’s go into the grass – to see and walk on

A child said What is the grass? Fetching it to me
with full hands.
How could I answer the child?… I do not know
what it is any more than he.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, from Leaves of Grass

No single person knows all the answers. Perhaps the humanity does. But, who has the strength and the time to learn and gather the entire experience of the world? However, we are aware that this is only the beginning of a feeble attempt.

It is said that grass is the most widely spread plant on our planet Earth. That it is not found only in the spaces of eternal ice. Sometimes, somewhere it can triumph over the desert sand. Not even its elder brother — stone — can resist it. It has been seen securely nesting in rocky regions. It covers the old graveyards, adorns stone fences and walls of neglected houses and churches. It cheerfully vibrates on aged roof tiles rising above the series of lives of different generations evolving underneath.

Grass is the habitat of insects; it has its part in the lives of birds and other animals. Including the man. To some it is food, to some it is a cure, and some use it as building material, for some it serves as bedding. There are no feet in this world, bare or shod, that did not touch it at least once. Not unconditionally so the eyes of passers—by. If they are lucky, small children gain their first experience of nature by means of grass. One cannot forget that. At least, one should not.

At this point begins the story about the memories of grassy microcosm — spaces of the first studies of Nature. About the memories of an intimate soft, or sometimes, sharp and painful contact with this jungle sprouted from a drop of water, about inerasable memories of the animal—like instinctive capacity to find the true grass blade, the blade offering unhazardous savoury sap. And, when the head has risen above the grassy carpets, precious experiences have influenced the development of sophisticated ecological awareness.

A story, insignificant at first sight, but a story of existential importance, told by means of metaphors, represented and recognized in the artworks of three distinguished visual artists, is not just a simple enlivening of a memory — not yet faded and persevering for some higher reasons; one lies in the comparison between the features of grass and human life — fragility and frailty, alongside obstinate resoluteness, the other lies in the joy of permanent discoveries of like—minded feelings and incentives. This story is an invitation to be attentive and receptive in a universal empathic joyfulness.

The joy of life hidden in the cry „Let’s go into the grass!” is successfully embodied in the compact harmony of the voices of Ljiljana Stojanović, Miljana Vuković and Nikola Vukosavljević. Their art is not loquacious, it transports only the very essence of cognition, the substance of the momentary insight into the sense of existence — to serve the purpose in an infinitesimal moment of eternity. The artistic position of these three artists, weather they are personally aware of it or not, is essentially closest to the principles of Zen which postulate that the nature of human beings is identical to real nature. It lives within us in the same way as it does in the objective world — always in motion. Motion is its aesthetic value. Therefore, we find Beauty in the essence and not in the form.
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Vesna Todorović

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